


You'd Best Start Believing

by ViciousRhythm



Series: Reylo trope coverage [12]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pirate, Alternate Universe - Pirates of the Caribbean Fusion, Gen, because that's how i roll, the implication is it would one day be reylo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 03:08:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7960057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViciousRhythm/pseuds/ViciousRhythm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a legendary pirate captain, his ship crewed by souls lost to the sea. He is called Kylo Ren and he cannot be killed, or so the tales say. But all men are at the mercy of one who has their heart, immortal or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Legend has it that Kylo Ren cannot die, and it’s true, for various definitions of truth. There are of course ways for him to die, because nothing can truly escape death, not even one who commands and tricks it as the notorious pirate captain does. Death will come for him eventually, as it does for all things, but he has his schemes for keeping it at bay. Immortality, even temporary immortality, does come with a price however. As he is reminded when he wakes with a gasp in the darkness of the night, clutching at his hollow chest.

“Mitaka!” Ren’s shout carries through the ship, bringing the cabin boy scrambling, catching at the doorframe with slippery fingers already starting to show webbing between them. The young man is a recent addition to the crew, picked up in the East China Sea only a handful of months ago, terrified at the prospect of meeting his death and eager to accept a place on the _Starkiller_. He’s fitting in quite well, though Mitaka has yet to lose the panicked fear around his eyes whenever his captain requires anything of him. Some never do.

“Direct the helmsman,” he snaps. “I want our course changed immediately for Alderaan.”

Mitaka nods frantically, feet nearly skidding across the damp floorboards on his way out of the room. Ren ignores it, knowing his orders will be delivered post haste if only out of fear. Slowly, painfully, he swings his legs out of bed and places his feet on the floor, feeling unsteady. There is a space in his chest that hasn’t felt sensation in decades and centuries, an ancient absence that hasn’t felt empty in lifetimes. And yet tonight, just now, he could swear the place where his heart used to be had contracted for a moment, as if his phantom heart stuttered over fear.

It aches still, as Ren stands and dresses. Though it is the middle of the night, a creature such as himself has no need for sleep, only finding it out of boredom. His crew, massive and constantly at work, will be ready for the change of course, and Ren will be there to see to it personally.

The deck is a mess of action when he arrives, men hauling ropes and setting all to the ready as Ren walks easily between them, the crowd parting for him. His helmsman, a once-Irish sailor whose eyes are now the depthless black of the great sharks of the Atlantic with sharpened teeth to match, nods to acknowledge Ren’s appearance at the helm. Hux has never quite learned to show the respect Ren is due, but he serves his purpose well and has never annoyed Ren to the point of dispatching him.

“A change of course, captain?” Hux questions mildly. “We’ve not made port in Alderaan within my memory.”

“I detest the place,” Ren says with none of the emotion such a statement might elicit in lesser, mortal men. “The trip has become necessary, however.”

“It has not yet been ten years, captain,” Hux comments, as though Ren is unaware. As though he could forget the time table placed on him. It has been only seven years since Kylo Ren’s feet struck dry land, but there are some things that must be done, and if he must flood Alderaan to facilitate this trip, so be it.

Ren ignores Hux, eyes on the darkened line of the horizon, barely visible where the sky splits from the sea, and waits. He is quite skilled with waiting, and hardly feels the strain of standing in position as the dawn eases its way into the sky. His focus, instead, is on the shallow beating under his breast, where a heart should no longer be able to torment him. He’d carved it out himself and paid the price for the power he wields, and will protect that singular weakness at all cost. His crew and ship be damned.

When the island of Alderaan hazes into view, it is a mere smudge against the smartingly bright blue of the sky at noon, more than a full day since Kylo Ren awoke with phantom pains in his chest. The waiting has not made him restless, but rather sharpened his focus and determination, and he calls on the power afforded him as they draw near to the narrow spit of land.

The monster he calls from the depths is more used to the destruction of ships and devouring of men than to bathing an island in violent waves, but the kraken obeys his bidding. In great sheets to rival the lashing of a hurricane, the ocean rises up with the monster, crashing down to flatten picturesque palm trees and sleepy towns. Ren pays no mind to the souls lost in the deluge. They are not under his purview and therefor none of his concern.

The language of a curse is important, Ren has learned in the years since his soul was bound to the ocean and his ship. He may not step foot onto dry land, but the ruined wreckage of Alderaan, soaked in so much seawater as to be unrecognizable, hardly counts. It resembles a marsh more than any livable land by the time he is through with it, and Ren can walk the place without fear of consequences.

The place he is looking for sits near what was once a happy home, belonging to a small family – a mother and father and their young son. He once played in the tall grass of the meadow beside that house, before he was called Kylo Ren, and buried in the hard earth of that place is what he seeks. Though the ocean waters have washed the place clean and torn nearly all the grass up by its roots, Ren’s chest is buried deep, much deeper than any corpse, deeper than the sea could sweep away.

It is paranoia that has led him here, Ren is sure. The secrets of his mortal life have faded out of human memory, of course, and no one would think to till the hard, useless earth that lay beside his parents’ home. The chest – and his heart – must be safe, but Ren must see it with his own eyes before he can make himself believe it. His chest, after all, has never felt like this before, as though it longs for the organ that should be there.

He digs alone, for hours, having forbidden his crew from following lest they learn the secret of why he has come here. The ground is softer from the water, becoming slop for the first inches and returning to the hard-packed earth he vaguely recalls from his childhood after those inches. The last feet are a task, carved out by the light of the lowering sun as sweat runs down Ren’s back, his jacket long abandoned in deference to the heat.

The chest is there, as he suspected, an old oaken thing made of deceptively simple wooden sides and sturdy iron bands, familiar in his hands. The whole thing sits in his grasp hardly filling the span of his hands, a chest made to fit the heart of a man hardly out of childhood. Ren’s relief is cut short at the sight of the latch, mangled and broken where a solid lock should sit.

He stares for a moment, lost for a reaction. This is impossible. For someone to not only have found his childhood home, but located the chest in the neighboring property, dug it up, and found a way to destroy the lock holding it closed. It is near impossible, he corrects himself, rage and fear rising like the tide within him, the dark tentacles hanging about his shoulders twisting and grasping as the only outward sign beyond the sudden thinning of his lips.

With an inarticulate cry, the chest flies from him, thrown in his rage up and out of the wide hole dug into the earth. Ren climbs out after it, digging great gouges into the dirt where his hands claw ungracefully toward the light after his ransacked treasure. It sits, innocently knocked open and incriminatingly empty, bare feet from the hole. The blood-stained rag wrapping his heart is gone too, likely wrapped around the wretched, still-beating thing wherever it is. Kylo Ren would be dead if it did not still beat, after all.

“Something,” he mutters to himself, crouching in the muddy water and cradling the empty chest like a child. “There must be _something_.”

It is a part of himself, tied to Ren by old and powerful magic, and he can trace it, if only a piece of the original remains. The smallest stain is his saving grace, a trickle of dried blood dripped over the lip of the chest from those centuries ago when he first placed the heart into the chest with shaking, determined hands. He touches careful, steady fingers to the rust red stain, eyes slipping closed to let himself follow the faint trail left behind by whoever has dared to steal from him.

The vision he sees is clouded in a foggy haze, washed thin by the waves he himself called to this place. There is something though, and Ren chases the image doggedly. It is a woman, slim and golden brown, dressed in men’s clothes of short, sand-colored breeches and a loose canvas shirt. She looks about fearfully in his vision, dirt piled around her from where she’s dug through the earth to search out the chest now resting in Ren’s hands. She pries the lock open with more ease than is possible – this much he is sure of. There must be magic with her to open such a lock.

She peers curiously at the cloth-wrapped heart, the details of her expression lost to his sight. After moments of useless staring, she peels back the wrap almost hesitantly, revealing wet, red flesh, pumping softly as it has for hundreds of years in the dark confines of his chest. She covers it right back up, likely disgusted by the sight, but her hesitance disappears as she scoops his heart into her hands and, startled by something he cannot guess in his detached vision of her, the young woman tucks his heart into her shirt, nestled beside her own under the canvas material, and begins kicking mounds of dirt back into place frantically.

Ren loses the vision afterward, the connection lost, but it is enough. He tosses the now useless wooden chest back into the hole, not bothering to replace the earth as the girl had, stalking back toward his ship. There is a cold calmness about him, masking tumultuous fury at the violation. At the very least, he knows he is in no immediate danger. The girl has only stolen his heart, not destroyed it. If she were only looking to kill him, he would already be dead, so she must want something else from him.

He won’t have to go looking for her, Kylo Ren comforts himself, trudging through the wreckage of his past and back toward the _Starkiller_. All he must do is wait. She will come to him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you people are proud of yourselves. I didn't mean to write more of this, especially right away. But here it is anyway....

Poe is near dead when they find him, not even conscious enough to form full sentences, but the first word from his lips is _Finn_. It’s a miracle they manage to ease Poe into coherence at all, though Rey knows all along that his time is fleeting. His body is so broken there is no hope of Poe surviving through the night, and Rey’s heart breaks to watch a second friend die in as many days, but she will be there to hold his hand and wipe the sweat from his brow in his last moments. She will hear his last words.

“Finn,” Poe insists again. “Did you find him? Is he here? Did they - ?”

“Shh.” Rey smooths a hand through Poe’s damp curls, ignoring her tears, flowing steadily and silent. “He’s gone, Poe. His body was lost in the wreck.”

“No,” he groans, writhing and visibly struggling for his thoughts, his skin already going grey once more. “He took Finn. Kylo Ren.”

“Hush now, Poe.” It’s a sailor’s tale, and Rey can’t chastise him for the flight of fancy, not now, but he is insistent.

“He’s real.” Poe clutches at her hand with what must be the last of his strength, panting. “Kylo Ren isn’t a myth, Rey. You have to save Finn.”

Poe slips away in the night, long hours after his determined accusations about the mythical pirate captain. Rey is there beside him when he does, a nurse on his other side pressing cool cloths to his fevered skin in a useless attempt at easing his passing. He knew the risks the moment he stepped onto a ship, Rey tells herself. Poe always wanted to live and die by the sea, and she shouldn’t grieve for him and Finn as bitterly as she does, but she can’t help it.

Weeks and months later, Poe’s words come back to haunt her. Finn’s body was not the only one lost in the wreckage of the _Resistance,_ of course. Plenty of sailors are never recovered, and plenty of superstitious folk say they’ve been claimed by Kylo Ren. It’s nothing but a tale. A name that belongs to an idea, not a man. But she can’t let it go, can’t dismiss the conviction in Poe’s eyes, so she has to try.

Rey scours port cities, carefully spending the fortune left to her by her late estranged uncle in small drabs, finding libraries and fortune tellers and drunkards alike with tales of the fearsome Kylo Ren. It is said he captains the ship _Starkiller_ and ferries souls to Fiddler’s Green, at a price. One mystic, gnarled with age and nearly indecipherable in the way she couches fact in fiction and bad poetry, tells her Ren makes deals. One hundred years of service aboard his ship in exchange for a delay in judgment, a devil’s bargain for those who fear death. It is the first Rey hears of such a bargain and not nearly the last.

The pages she finds speaking of an even older bargain, a curse, are fragile and stained, the written words faded where they’ve soaked into the parchment over ages. _Ren traded his heart,_ Rey reads, careful not to harm the paper thin as a butterfly’s wing, _in exchange for the power to control a terrible beast and sail the ocean into eternity._ If one could find the hiding place of his heart - not on his ship, too close and too dangerous a hiding place - it could be destroyed, and the immortal captain with it. Rey has nothing so quick as death in mind.

It takes a further search and the depletion of her funds to find the tiny island of Alderaan and the secrets hidden there. A massacre took place there once, a storm of blood leaving only one young man standing with red staining him in his solitude. A boy named Ben once lived on this island, Rey thinks, standing among gently swaying trees, the sounds of the few brave enough to claim this cursed and bloodstained isle as home at her back. He lived on the north side of the island, where none dare to break ground.

Superstition is a powerful thing. Rey is thankful for it, as no one quite remembers why Alderaan is nearly uninhabited, and she doesn’t have to worry about anyone happening upon her as she digs fruitlessly through the dirt. There is no one to laugh at the foolish girl in men’s clothes, turning over dry and dead earth searching for a myth. And there is no one to bear witness when she finds it.

The chest is buried deep, so far underground that Rey has had to terrace steps into the earth around her in order to pull herself to the surface a number of feet above her head. It’s a small, unassuming thing. The sides are simple but sturdy oak planks, bands of iron wrapped about it. The most forbidding sight is the lock looped through the latch - equally sturdy iron with nary a keyhole in sight. She studies it, prying at the seams of the chest looking for weaknesses and finds none. Breaking the lock is the only way Rey can see to open it.

The tools she’s brought are nearly all useless - what good will a lockpick do with no keyhole? But she does have a chisel and several short, strong knives, so she goes about trying to break the lock if she cannot pick it. Smeared in dirt and sweat, cursing the damned chest, Rey finally manages to break the lock into three neat pieces, and swallows hard as the moment of truth stares her in the face.

The hinges are hardly rusted, allowing the chest to swing open easily, revealing a lump of misshapen cloth inside. It flexes like a living thing as she stares at it, the reality unthinkable. For all the time she’s spent hunting down a fairytale in the hopes of bargaining for her friend’s soul, Rey never thought to consider she would find a physical living heart. Perhaps the thing Kylo Ren treasured most, his secrets, a metaphor, but not a true heart.

Hesitantly, Rey peels back a fold of fabric, eyes wide and stomach roiling as a patch of sticky red flesh is revealed. It pulses, the beating of a living heart, and as it does, a rushing sound fills her ears. The sound of the surf pulling sharply away from the shore, the unmistakable precursor to a tsunami.

Rey jolts, flipping the cloth back over the heart, and scoops it out of the chest with careful hands. If this is Kylo Ren’s living heart, he will die if it is destroyed, and he is no good to her dead. Distantly, the sound of waves beating violently against the shore comes to her and Rey knows instinctively, in the place that knew when her search for forgotten legends was leading her true, that there is little time for her to flee to safety with her prize. If all she has read is right, Kylo Ren cannot set foot on dry land but once every ten years, and if she is unlucky enough to have stolen his heart near to that day, Rey will only be safe as far inland as she can be. Hurriedly, she stuffs the heart inside of her shirt, secured there under the bands tying back her breasts, and scrambles out of the hole to kick and shove the dirt back into place. Rey spent the last eight months chasing Kylo Ren’s heart, and now it is her turn to run once he learns what she’s done. She needs all the time she can possibly buy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this was...not supposed to happen. But the reception of Kylo's POV was so awesome and people said they want to see more (and Rachel coached me through a plot), so here's Rey's POV for the beginning. The rest is. In the ether for now, but planned, so maybe you'll see that someday soon.

**Author's Note:**

> Officially first, but unofficially second, in a series of fics inspired by the rides at Disneyland. Y'all can thank my friend angrysmall for cajoling me into doing this. Some will be like this, or like To Dust or to Gold, and be an AU riffing off the ride, others will be set in Disneyland.


End file.
